The United States and Coercive Diplomacy edited by Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE PRESS Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors alone. They do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace. UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE 1200 17th Street NW, Suite 200 Washington, DC 20036-3011 © 2003 by the Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace, except for chapter 4, “The Delicate Balance between Coercion and Diplomacy: The Case of Haiti, 1994,” © 2003 by Robert Pastor. All rights reserved. First published 2003 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of Amer- ican National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The United States and coercive diplomacy / edited by Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-929223-45-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-929223-44-7 (paper : alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign relations—1993-2001. 2. Diplomacy. 3. Aggression (International law) I. Art, Robert J. II. Cronin, Patrick M., 1958- JZ1480.U553 2003 327.73’009’049–dc21 2003041666 ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ 7 Coercive Diplomacy against Iraq, 1990–98 JON B. ALTE R MAN RAQ HAS BEEN A RATHER PECULIAR FOE of the United States’. Badly mismatched in terms of population, wealth, military strength, or Ialmost any other conceivable measure, Iraq seems poorly posi- tioned to win any confrontation. Equally unclear is why Iraq would want to provoke a confrontation with the United States. There is no ideolog- ical imperative to do so, and the countries arguably share an interest in a constant and stable flow of oil out of Iraq and its oil-rich neighbors. How much more puzzling, then, that Iraq has emerged as one of the longer-running security challenges for the United States and bat- tlefield opponent for U.S. military forces. For the past twelve years, U.S. officials have tried, with varying degrees of international cooper- ation and with varying degrees of success, to use the theories of coer- cive diplomacy to counter Iraqi threats. The success of such a strategy is unclear, because it is impossible to know what Iraq might have done had the United States pursued another strategy. But two things are relatively clear. The first is that the outcome of the past twelve years—no serious attack by Iraq on its neighbors and no substantial gains in its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs— would have been one of the more optimistic predictions of Iraqi behavior in the early 1990s. The efforts of the past twelve years have not all been in vain. Equally important, though, another twelve years 275 276 Jon B. Alterman of the same policies could scarcely be expected to produce similar results. By the first years of the twenty-first century, sanctions were visibly fraying, as international resolve diminished and Iraqi officials became increasingly adept at circumventing restrictions on their country’s income and spending. A new strategy would need to be found. This chapter concentrates on episodes in the 1990s in which the U.S. government attempted to use coercive diplomacy against Iraq. Such a policy took place in the context of a broader policy of containment and deterrence—a policy that enjoyed far wider interna- tional support than U.S. efforts to coercively induce specific Iraqi actions. This chapter seeks to understand how coercive diplomacy might have been applied better in the years following the Iraqi inva- sion of Kuwait. It also seeks to explain how the United States should approach its future policy toward dilemmas like those posed by Iraqi behavior in the period under study. The chapter concludes that several aspects of the Iraqi case made it a poor candidate for coercive diplomacy after the early 1990s and that the appropriateness of such a policy only declined over time. These aspects include but are not limited to the drawn-out nature of the conflict, the relatively large number of confrontations, the nature of the target regime, limited will in the United States for coercive measures, and the difficulties of coalition maintenance. Few of those factors, however, were predictable from the outset. In addition, U.S. policy toward Iraq was particularly burdened by an expanding set of increasingly ill-defined goals. It is far easier to use coer- cive diplomacy to achieve a limited, positive outcome in the short term than to manage a number of competing goals over more than a decade. The passage of time undermines both coalition maintenance and resolve at home, which in turn make application of a coercive diplo- macy strategy extraordinarily difficult. The coercive diplomacy discussion in this chapter deals primarily with the period from August 1990 to December 1998. Before August 1990 U.S. policy was to engage Iraq, not coerce it. Iraq had seemed to emerge contrite from a long and bloody war with Iran, and “the widely shared view in the international community was that Saddam Hus- sein was following a more moderate path.”1 After December 1998 Iraq, 1990–98 277 U.S. policy was not to coerce the regime in Baghdad but rather to remove it. That month, high-ranking U.S. officials announced that a primary goal of U.S. policy was to achieve “regime change” in Iraq. Given the repressiveness of the regime at home and its isolation abroad, regime change would seem to represent a death sentence for Baghdad’s brutal leaders. Although Alexander George notes that regime change is a potential goal of coercive diplomacy, it is hard to imagine that he is referring to cases in which regime change would almost certainly be suicidal for the current leadership. In such condi- tions, it seems impossible to construct a set of consequences more dire than removing the leadership from power.2 The round of coercive diplomacy that ended with a U.S.-led mili- tary attack in March 2003 confirms the difficulty of coercing regime change in cases like Iraq. The Bush administration, however, avoided many of the pitfalls outlined in this chapter by keeping diplomatic confrontations focused and limited in time. IRAQ AND COERCIVE DIPLOMACY George envisions three possible goals for coercive diplomacy: to use the threat of force or limited force to persuade an adversary to “stop short of the goal” of an action currently under way; to persuade the adversary to undo an action already carried out; and to achieve “a cessation of the opponent’s hostile behavior through a demand for change in the com- position of the adversary’s government or in the nature of the regime.”3 From 1990 to 1998 the United States sought explicitly to use the threat of force or limited force to achieve the first two goals. While changing the regime in Baghdad was a desire of the U.S government throughout that period, its efforts were generally directed not so much at persuad- ing the Iraqi government to be more inclusive or to change its nature as at removing the government itself. The episodes of coercive diplomacy did not occur in isolation but rather were one tool among many that the United States employed. In that regard, U.S. ambassador April Glaspie’s widely criticized demarche to Saddam Hussein a week before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was diplomacy, but it does not appear to have been coercive. According to Iraqi transcripts of the discussion, which the State Department 278 Jon B. Alterman reportedly has not contested, Glaspie expressed her concern over the situation on Iraq’s southern border but never threatened any sort of mil- itary, economic, or political response if Iraq were to cross into Kuwait.4 By contrast, Operation Desert Storm was coercive, but it was not diplomacy. While a great deal of diplomacy went into assembling a coalition of a score of countries to confront Iraq, on the Iraqi end the war was a pure exercise of overwhelming military force. The allied forces did not fight a “limited war” with the goal of liberating Kuwait; rather, allied forces continued to fight the Iraqi army in retreat, although they did stop short of destroying the Republican Guard or marching on Baghdad. In this, pressure from Arab (and especially Saudi and Egyptian) coalition allies strongly influenced U.S. gov- ernment decision making. The peace that emerged was not so much negotiated as accepted by the Iraqis, and it amounted to acceptance of relevant UN Security Council resolutions. Desert Shield and Its Aftermath From August 2, 1990—the day the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait—until the bombs began falling on January 16, 1991, it was not clear that force would be required to coerce Iraqi troops into withdrawing.5 Indeed, at the time of the Iraqi invasion U.S. policy had been leaning the other way, favoring engagement with Iraq rather than sanctions against it. National Security Directive 26, signed by President Bush on October 2, 1989, called for expanded “economic and political incen- tives for Iraq” and concluded that “normal relations between the Unit- ed States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.”6 Although the actual aid extended to Iraq was relatively meager—mostly in the form of Com- modity Credit Corporation guarantees and Export-Import Bank devel- opment loan credits—the gestures were enough to set off alarm bells in Congress. In the first half of 1990, the administration curtailed its courtship of Iraq, partly in response to congressional pressure and partly in response to Iraq’s weapons development efforts and its open threats directed at neighboring states.